Ken Cuccinelli on Families & Children

Community standards include no porn shops near schools

Exotic dancers had been accused of [exceeding community standards, so their defense team] went to court armed with girly magazines and videos from a local store to enter into evidence. If necessary, the team said, they could subpoena the rental records
from the store and show just how standard the consumption of porn was in the community. [The exotic dancers won].

Those on the other side of the argument, such as conservative state Sen. Ken Cuccinelli (R-Fairfax), say the community standard test
creates a bar too high. "We have a porn shop in the middle of Centreville and it's very near a school and a day-care center," says Cuccinelli. Community members contacted him about it, so he worked with the deputy prosecutor, trying to put together
what essentially amounted to citizen focus groups. They tried to establish that a porn shop near a school was not embraced by the community standard. But the process was too cumbersome and the prosecutor eventually moved on to more pressing matters.

Adultery laws ought to stay, with more enforcement

Sodomy may have been knocked off the books, but adultery remains, as former Luray Town Attorney John Bushey knows all too well. In 2003 he was convicted of adultery--"any person, being married, who voluntarily shall have sexual intercourse with any
person not his or her spouse shall be guilty of adultery, punishable as a Class 4 misdemeanor," quoth state code.

Bushey was 65 at the time of his conviction and 18 years into a marriage with Cindy Bushey, the town clerk. He pursued an affair with
another woman, but when the relationship went south, she called the cops. Page County Circuit Court dropped the case after he agreed to 20 hours of community service, but the press howled that prosecuting one affair in a sea of adultery was unfair.

"I think [adultery laws] ought to stay on the books," Cuccinelli says. "Frankly it wouldn't hurt to enforce them more." He equates adultery to perjury inasmuch as the occasional prosecution or two would get people thinking twice.